This paper explores the methodological and discursive transition in Aurel Voina’s theoretical conceptualisation of cosmetic science. The primary focus is the rewriting of personal and professional identity, assessing how Aurel Voina negotiated his conceptual and practical expertise from his role as eugenics ideologue and policy maker in the i…[Read more]

‘Independence’ for bantustans was universally rejected by the international community in
the late 1970s and early 1980s. How the status of Lesotho and Swaziland as
internationally recognised states deeply embedded in South Africa’s economic and
political orbit differed from that of the bantustans was clear in some cases, murky in
others. The a…[Read more]

This editorial discusses the articles published and the activities undertaken by The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship during 2021, and calls for research system-wide cultural changes and wider contextual awareness in order to make scholarly communication fairer and up to the challenges of our time.

This article probes the history of education and current pedagogical practices among Malayali physician-teachers, vaidya-gurus, of Ayurveda in central Kerala. Considering the sources vaidya-gurus cite as the bases of their teaching styles, especially a three-part method known as mukhāmukhaṃ (‘face-to-face’ instruction), I discuss the place, produc…[Read more]

In this article, I hitch the ever-present awareness of disease in my personal life and our shared world today to a pointed and academic reflection on the ways we consume and re-present information about disease from premodern South Asia that’s contained in texts.

In this article we trace the history of Urban Renewal in Lansing through a collaborative research project involving undergraduate students and the course instructor. Looking in fine-grain detail at the block and individual house level, the project reveals the patchwork of discrimination that African Americans faced in accessing housing in the…[Read more]

The article follows the contours of a conversation with Fulvio Aurora, Paolo Fierro and Edoardo Turri, three members of the Italian health activist organization Medicina Democratica, which will also function as the backbone of our account of the initial radical
impetus and the later demise of the Italian public health system, the Servizio…[Read more]

This research work is an investigation into the reception of anti-smoking advertisements
that make use of “fear appeals”. The objective of the research is to bring audience
perceptions, interpretations and making sense processes of such advertising campaigns to
the limelight. Instead of measuring effects or effectiveness of anti-smoking mes…[Read more]

This study examined the communication avenues for combating breast cancer in Orba, a rural community of Enugu State, Nigeria. To accomplish this goal, 200 women from the community were sampled. The results revealed that 87% of the respondents were aware of media messages on breast cancer; however, 74.5% and 65% respectively, claimed that they had…[Read more]

Representation, primarily understood as ‘presence’ or ‘appearance’ with an implied
visual component, is a critical concept in the cultural milieu. Conceived as images,
performances, and imitations, representations propagate through various media:
films, television, photographs, advertisements, and other forms of popular culture.
As such, r…[Read more]

The earliest medical descriptions of anorexia occurred in 1689 with Richard
Morton’s Phthisiologia, Or, A Treatise of Consumptions, however, it took another
century for medical science to accept anorexia nervosa as a medical condition.
Later on, it was Hilde Bruch who initiated the first public discussion on anorexia
in the latter half of t…[Read more]

This study examined such issues as social media in personality development
and their influence on the development of public activism among young people.
We also estimate the efficiency that various forms of information exchange
have (shared or anonymous). The empirical base of the research includes
sociological surveys held in Kazakhstan. We…[Read more]

A little-known feature of the vast migrant labour system that supplied South Africa’s gold-mining industry was the Deferred Pay Interest Fund. For much of the 20th century, a portion of the wages owed to African mine workers was deferred and remitted to them only at the end of their contracts. This is well-known, but what happened to the i…[Read more]

Over the past year, artists, doctors, medical professionals, and international agencies such as the World Health Organisation have been using comics to communicate the risks of the SARS-CoV2 virus. The visual economy and a near-universal language of lines, balloons, and panels in comics makes them well suited to disseminate epidemic-related…[Read more]

Industrial mining on the Central African Copperbelt attracted substantial, if transient, white populations from the outset, though these communities have been treated separately. Many thousands of white traders, prospectors, mineworkers, engineers, general itinerants and would-be settlers were attracted by the copper boom and often spent time…[Read more]

This article examines the changing forms of African agency in the context of contestations over natural resource governance with the European Union. The authors argue that EU policy is motivated by material self-interest but that it has not been able to successfully implement these policies. The way these policies have been challenged by African…[Read more]

One of the recurring themes in the public perception of containment policies during the current COVID-19 pandemic are the supposedly uneven and everchanging measures taken up by international, national and local authorities. This is especially the case in countries with a federal structure, like Germany. Not surprisingly, historical containment…[Read more]

CORVIDS * QRt by PRURITUS MIGRANS * CC: BY-NC-SA

The first Aswan Dam was built at the dawn of the twentieth century and celebrated as a triumph of imperial engineering. Five years after its completion, workers returned to extend the dam. Photographer D. S. George recorded both the building and extension projects for the Egyptian Public Works Department in a series of images that give a unique…[Read more]